Weak Power
If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness. The God and Father of the Lord Jesus (blessed be he forever!) knows that I do not lie.
It is necessary to boast; nothing is to be gained by it, but I will go on to visions and revelations of the Lord. I know a person in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows. And I know that such a person—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows— was caught up into paradise and heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat. On behalf of such a one I will boast, but on my own behalf I will not boast, except of my weaknesses.
But if I wish to boast, I will not be a fool, for I will be speaking the truth. But I refrain from it, so that no one may think better of me than what is seen in me or heard from me, even considering the exceptional character of the revelations.
Paul of Tarsus
2 Cor 11:30-31, 12:1-7a
This week, we are taking a slight detour from focusing on David's saga, but our reading of 2 Corinthians 12 still bears on his story. Paul says earlier in this very same letter that Christ “lifts the veil” of the old covenant (2 Cor 3:14), and so for Christians, reading the stories of the Old Testament through the lens of Christ unveils them in a new way. We’ll get to that later.
As for this second letter to the Corinthians (which some scholars think may have actually been at least his third, with a “painful visit” in between), our reading today of 2 Cor 12:2-10 gives us two main parts. First, we have Paul talking about this mystical experience, followed by his “thorn in his side.”
If you don’t know or don’t recall, the Corinth church had been disrupted by so-called “super-apostles” who claimed Christ, but taught a false gospel. Corinth had been in a center of religious activity that, for lack of a better word, was kinda New Age-y for its time. In the diversity of gods and practices in the ancient world, this group of Christians was working out its boundaries in how it interacted with their neighbors, with perhaps unique challenges due to their cultural influences. If Christ had set them free, what was the nature of this freedom? If God is love, what is the nature of this love? Does their belonging to Christ mean pure acceptance of all practices, anything goes, or are there responsibilities they hold to each other in Christ?
These “super-apostles” seem to have told the church in Corinth a message more pleasing to the ear, undermining Paul’s authority through a variety of tactics including emphasizing their spiritual gifts, success, and popularity. They were probably cool, charming, and well-put-together, and he just wasn’t. So Paul, with great passion, is trying in this letter to exhort his fellow believers not to be led to false teachings. For whatever happened to the Corinthians church, these letters left a lasting impression on enough of them and their neighboring churches to preserve at all costs.
As for our selection today, we might be more intrigued to hear about his experience of the “third heaven” than his struggles. In his cosmology, this “third heaven” would be something like a total unification with God in “paradise,” something too sacred to speak of. Paul knows this is what we want to hear. But crucially, he only raises it to get his audience interested in the more important message about God’s grace.
A Type of Con
Paul was distraught because he saw that his people were vulnerable to a type of con. The con he focuses on here is someone boasting about their big spiritual experiences to help sell a false gospel. As it happens, I am familiar with this type of con. But we don’t have to use big spiritual experiences for a con, we can turn to any kind of experiential authority to preach any kind of false gospel.
Election season is a perfect time for a con. We know that politicians promise us false things all the time. I think the harder ones to parse out sometimes are the con of their experiential authority, “I’ve done this, I’ve done that, raised this raise that…” Given the state of our collective cynicism towards politics, maybe this isn’t really fooling anybody anymore, but we still like to know each politician’s experiential authority as rhetorical ammo and nominal commitments, if nothing else.
But maybe this isn’t that weird, but actually quite normal. We surely do it all the time in our domains; what is a resume but a collection of our experiential authority? I remember trying to stretch hard to make my first jobs at a t-shirt shop and general store clerk and mailroom guy sound more “experientially authoritative” than they were. And maybe it’s necessary to function, we want to hire people that have some kind of experience for the job. So why wouldn’t the same be true of spiritual experience for spiritual authorities? Wouldn’t we want our spiritual teachers to be spiritually experienced?
But there’s a problem with this and why it leads to a type of con in the spiritual world: it brings our attention to ourselves, our accomplishments, and our power, instead of God. If we’re not careful, the church increasingly resembles political theater. As is a theme over and over in the Book of Isaiah, this is a sure road to disaster.
And has been widely observed, when we aren’t centering God, our politics can easily become our God instead. Suddenly, we treat politicians as de facto spiritual authorities and we support them in wielding spiritual power; we often support them because they are effective at wielding spiritual power. I would wager that there is not a single national politician who does not know how to do so, playing with emotions, rhetoric, focus, and more to wield and abuse the main spiritual power source: confidence. They are our super-apostles. Beware of how they are vying for your attention, your resources, and your very voice. Pay attention to the kinds of experiential authority they boast, and ask whether it matters at all.
The only reason Paul mentions his experience at all is to essentially block and discredit the false authority of the “super-apostles.” He knows his experience doesn’t say anything about his ability to help people relate to God. Instead, he sees his true spiritual authority in his weakness.
To keep me from being too elated, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me, to keep me from being too elated. Three times I appealed to the Lord about this, that it would leave me, but he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.” So I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me. Therefore I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ, for whenever I am weak, then I am strong.
Paul of Tarsus
2 Cor 12:7b-10
Some Imitating Weaknesses
I won’t boast of the spiritual experiences I’ve had, though I have before. I won’t go back over my spiritual experience “resume” here, but like Paul, you can know that I have one.
Instead, I will try to imitate Paul for a second and boast about just a few weaknesses. Here are some thorns in my side: I’ve gained a lot of weight over the years, I can be selfish, I can be condescending, I can be impatient, I get distracted too easily with addictions and idolatries of mind, body, and spirit, I haven’t accomplished a fraction of the things I’ve dreamed and I quit all the dream careers I didn’t fail at. And there’s a million other little things that I ain’t about to tell the world here. If I were to boast from more experiential authority, I could say that I’ve even shared more weaknesses more vulnerably elsewhere (most notably bombing at open mics as an over-sharing comic for years), but my weakness today is self-protective shyness out of fear that too much weakness will lead to some kind of calamity.
I can boast about these things because despite these things God loves me. That doesn’t mean he always likes or approves of what I do, quite the opposite, but I know he loves me. And the vacuum left by my impotence only greater illuminates God’s love, glory and power. In my sin and my shortcomings and missteps and miscues and outright misdeeds, God points to the virtues, the truths, the good and the beautiful things that I have no part of but nevertheless are wonderful blessings to me because of him.
There are many ways this passage has been wielded for harm. Some take it to mean we should embrace martyrdom and suffering for suffering’s sake. That’s not quite it. For those of us who have truly devious “thorns” in our side, truly debilitating us and impairing our abilities to feel normal and act in the world and love ourselves and neighbor, there is a potential toxic message that our thorn is a gift. I don’t think this is what Paul is saying either. Rather, the thorns that break us down are sites for where God has done, can do, and will do wonders. Part of the gospel is seeing this huge cast of characters throughout the Scriptures and all their thorns—disability, dishonor, sinfulness, and so much more—and trusting that God uses these thorns to redeem us, sometimes beyond our cognition. This can seem so impossible that it seems almost insulting to suggest. But I believe this is where the God of impossibilities is trying to work. He doesn’t give us the pain; he somehow makes our pain a giver.
And so this is what I hear Paul saying: in coming up against his pain, in seeing his limits and failures, and in accepting all he can’t do, he sees all that God can do, has done, and will do. And it is more than sufficient.
The Parable of the Fridge
Here’s a brief story that’s a bit dangerous, because you’re supposed to tell a story from your scars, not your wounds, and this just happened yesterday, but…I’m in the middle of some spiritual warfare. My fridge may be broken.
Maybe this doesn’t sound like a big deal to you, but yesterday as we adjusted the internal temperature to get cooler, the opposite happened. The freezer ice started melting, the fridge stopped fridging, and suddenly I had the terrible, inconceivable “thorn in my side” of having to drink warmer ginger ale than I’d like. And you would not believe how unbelievably pathetic I was in my whining.
And to make the matter of my whining worse, my partner’s apartment is just five minutes down the hill, so we actually had a nearby fridge to keep our items fresh. We may have to eat lunch and dinner at her place a couple of times—my cross to bear!
And so if I can boast in one last weakness, it was absolutely embarrassing how much this bothered me last night. It didn’t hit me until driving back from the Great Food Evacuation that despite our financial challenges, we still have it better than just about anyone in the world does. And then the vast expanse of time hit me and how it’s such a hidden grace that we don’t have to hunt or gather. Pearls before this oinky swine!
And it seems this was the trapdoor out into the lush field of some freakin’ perspective. That said, I hope it’s an easy fix. I’m still weak. I like my cold fake soda. So I’m going to rely on the love of God via some YouTube tutorials.
By the way, I promised not to forget David before this is over. And in Christ’s illumination of his story, we can see one huge difference between what makes David God’s true king and Saul is how they accept their weakness. David does, but Saul never really does. Whenever one of Saul’s “fridges” breaks, he tries to fix the problem through his own spiritual authority instead of through God.
And as a spiritual law of the universe, because Saul doesn’t accept his weakness, he can’t accept God’s grace. David is not after God’s heart because David is mighty, but because over and over he has a very strong sense of his weakness compared to God. It gives him the healthiest expression of a “fear of the Lord,” it keeps him close to the Scripture, to the prophets, and to God’s love.
Weak Power
So for one last go at a summary, Paul seems to be saying, “I experienced something so holy I can’t even talk about it…and yet, that was nothing compared to the grace of God I could only find through embracing my weakness.”
If you notice a pattern in some of the things Paul cautions against in his epistles such as in Galatians—pharmakeia, drunkenness, sexual immorality, idolatry—it is often things that give us a counterfeit experience of God through experiencing pleasure and power. These are very misleading experiential authorities of the work of the Spirit.
Neither Paul nor Christ started a religion to give us experiences for the sake of experiences. Paul didn’t spend 14 years trying to figure out how to help other people come to the third heaven of paradise. He spent 14 years not talking about it. He spent 14 years not distracting people with it. He spent 14 years trying to tell people that God is already with you in the very place you think he’s not with you.
He’s only bringing up his ecstatic experience because a bunch of con artists in Christ’s church are trying to sell people on something that not only they don’t need, but something ripping them apart. Instead, Paul is pointing us to Christ and his poverty (2 Cor 8), not just of his money, but the spiritual poverty of emptying himself of his power (Phil 2), making himself weaker and weaker in human terms so that more and more of the true power of the Almighty God could burst through for our sake.
We sometimes forget that so much deception happens through someone imbuing confidence in something we should not be confident in. Which is why the underlying word of “con artist” is confidence. Put not your confidence in the wrong thing, O mortal, but put it in God alone. For the super-apostles of our world are artists of confidence and attempting to steal yours. Please, Paul begs, don’t believe the con artists.
And if Paul isn’t too proud to beg I won’t be either. Their power is weak, but God’s weakness is power. And in our weakness is His power.
